June 20, 2014 AT 12:00 pm

How many SD cards do you use with your Raspberry Pi? One? Two? Perhaps you don’t even have an SD card, and rely instead on a microSD with an adaptor to boot your Pi into Raspbian or whatever your preferred OS is.
Using multiple SD cards is more convenient than using just one, enabling you to easily switch between different operating systems for different projects. For instance, you might have an SD card dedicated to running your RaspBMC media centre and one for your RetroPie gaming system. A third SD card may be just the basic Raspbian, optimised to handle other types of projects or for learning the Scratch development language.
Whether you have one SD card or several, one thing that you will need in each scenario is the ability to back up your cards to avoid the problems that occur when your Raspberry Pi fails to boot.

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